Foundry generates real, downloadable typefaces and lets you evolve them by choosing the ones you like — the way you’d actually pick a font, not by describing one in words.
Most font tools ask you to write a prompt. But almost nobody can name the font they want — the vocabulary is specialist, and taste is easier to recognize than to describe. What everyone can do is look at two specimens and point at the better one.
So the front door is a short this-or-that quiz. Each pair is a real font with a known set of underlying traits, so your picks add up to a profile: a lean toward, say, warm, low-contrast, humanist letterforms. That profile seeds a first generation of eight typefaces — biased toward what you liked, but still exploring the edges, because the point is to find something you couldn’t have named.
From there it’s selective breeding. Keep the fonts you like; their traits cross and mutate a step at a time, and the next generation is drawn from what survived. A few rounds in, you land somewhere specific and yours. Pick a winner and Foundry can hunt for a companion text or display face to pair with it, the same way.
Foundry has no accounts and no user database. The taste quiz runs entirely in your browser with nothing sent anywhere.
Generating fonts uses the Mixfont API, which needs a key. You bring your own. It’s stored only in your browser’s local storage and sent with each generate request; it is never written to a database or a log on our side, and you can clear it in one click. (Mixfont’s API can’t be called straight from a browser, so the request passes through a serverless function — in memory, for that one call, and then it’s gone.)
The fonts you generate are yours. Mixfont deletes its copies within a day, so Foundry re-hosts each one so your collection outlives the session. A run lives at an unguessable URL — that link is the only key to it, and the list of your runs is kept in your browser, not on a server that knows who you are.
You don’t have to take any of that on faith. Foundry is open source — the code that handles your key is a few short files you can read. Read it on GitHub ↗